Re: write viruses? it's controversy time of the month

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Dude VanWinkle wrote:

> What if the viruses you create are programmed to only work on a
> private IP range (10.254.127.0/24), or that expire after a certain
> date (say 1 week).
>
> Does that remove the unwanted moral hangups?

No, because you have released self-replicating code.  The latter is the 
"essential badness".  Even if you release a "crippled" version of the 
code, someone else can take it and usually trivially (relative to the 
effort of initial authorship) alter it and then there is a new variant 
that (probably) won't be detected by at least some "antivirus" 
products, etc, et seq, ad nauseum...

So, any form of release of virus-like code is bad, with any form of 
release of previously unknown virus-like code being even worse.


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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